We might say someone is ‘hearing voices’ if you hear a voice when no-one is present with you, or which other people with you cannot hear.

form wrote:
Such experiences appeared in the sutta as normal is considered as mental disorders in modern medical diagnose.

Can you give some sutta references that describe this sort of 'hearing voices'?

Mike

For example, 1) the Buddha communicating with other beings, he heard a voice calling him.......

Hi form,

Can you post the sutta you are reffering too?

To study is to know the texts,
To practice is to know your defilements,
To attain the goal is to know and let go.

- Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo

With mindfulness immersed in the body
well established, restrained
with regard to the six media of contact,
always centered, the monk
can know Unbinding for himself.

- Ud 3.5

Ultimately, your meditation involves sustaining the knowing, followed by continuous letting go as you experience sense objects through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind. It involves just this much and there is no need to make anything more out of it.

In the Devatasamyutta and Devaputtasamyutta of the Samyutta Nikaya, devas and their offspring arrive in the Buddha's presence and talk to him. Normally, they appear as beautiful visions and illuminate the grove where he is staying, but sometimes the sutta has them "standing to one side" and speaking to him. This might be consistent with the Buddha "hearing a voice", but usually the "standing to one side" refers to beings (normally human) who approach the Buddha in the normal way. I can't think of any instances where the Buddha merely hears the voice of one contacting him.

IMHO hearing voices is just demons talking, maras trying to keep you from gaining progress. I don't think your hearing other humans thoughts that you are sitting next to on the subway. But I guess it's a psychic activity. Schizophrenics are typically above average intelligence and highly sensitive and tend to be spiritual or hyper religious the mania of bi polar at times is a state of super wholesomeness where one feels so positive and creative, aware and normally intelligent people when when manic can become genius.

form wrote: considered as mental disorders in modern medical diagnose.

Our Western culture seems to be focused mostly on the visual while neglecting the other senses. "Seeing images" is not deemed strange, in fact, it's regarded as creativity. But "hearing voices" is supposedly evidence of something being wrong with one.

As a small child I had two "imaginary friends" named saucy and fifi - and I really kept this up for some time, but I can't remember if I ever "saw" or "heard" them or not! lol - my best guess is that these were products of my imagination and not devas or something else, but hey - who knows??

May I draw the conclusion from your question that you believe there is no difference and that the Buddha and monks and ascetics of his time were just fantasizing when they talked about devas as real beings?

May I draw the conclusion from your question that you believe there is no difference and that the Buddha and monks and ascetics of his time were just fantasizing when they talked about devas as real beings?

I was talking about garrib's imaginary friends saucy and fifi. I don't really see what that has to do with buddha, monks, or ascetics who are all dead now. If garrib is just guessing as to whether they were devas or "just imaginary" as he says then really what is the difference....it seems that for garrib the manifestation of a deva or of imagination can not be differentiated....so what is the difference? Seems to me like there probably isn't a difference for garrib.
chownah
Edit: Also, isn't there a sutta that says something like the mind precedes all dhamas?
chownah

Okay, I see. It is a hard problem, philosophcally, to differentiate between actually existing other beings or just one's own imagination of other beings. I thought about this a lot when I was a child: How do I know that the others actually exist? Could it not be that they are all just fidgets of my imagination? How can I know? And I did not come to an actual solution other than the conclusion "It is useless to think in that way." Because it did not help me at all with any kinds of problems I had to deal with other living beings (mostly humans), who seem to live autonomous lives independent of my own stream of consciousness. It makes no sense to think of them as just "fidgets of my imagination" if I have apparently not enough control over my own imagination to influence their behaviour just through my mental power alone.
We had a lot of threads dealing with the topic of solipsism here over time as well.
But

chownah wrote:Edit: Also, isn't there a sutta that says something like the mind precedes all dhamas?

I don't think that this can be taken as a "dhammic" justification for solipsism. The first two verses of the Dhammapada are concerned specifically with good and bad (mental, which is the forerunner of all verbal and bodily) kamma and its vipaka:

Dhp verses 1&2 wrote:1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

Also, "dhammas", here, is translated variably as "mental states" by some, or as phenomena by others, or as events, or even very generally as things.
I tend to agree most with the last very general translation as "things". Mind precedes all things. From the position of each individual living being and their stream of consciousness, this is definitely true. "Things" can not be accounted for divorced from experience, and neither can "other beings". But living, conscious beings are a special case, because by definition they experience things by themselves, from their own perspective. We have a concept of that even without being able to wrap our minds around theirs and seeing the world through their eyes, because even if it would logically "make sense" that they might as well be just fidgets of our imagination: If we don't have enough control over our imagination to influence them directly by our intentional imagination, this perspective is just practically useless.

Of course I don't know what the difference might be for Garrib and his case of "imaginary friends", and whether he even remembers it clearly enough to try and differentiate in hindsight.

I would say a good test for differentiating between the two might be whether we can consciously influence the behaviour of those "others" simply by the powers of conscious imagination alone or not.

An interesting case are dreams, which we probably all experience almost every night, and sometimes remember, sometimes not so clearly. While we are enthralled in a dream we cannot usually tell that this is just our imagination. Things seem to happen against our will. And even after waking up we can have the feeling that there was something real going on there, or that this dream world could be just another reality with even other actual living beings in it. Yes, it is a hard problem, I admit. And I don't really know a solution either.

I must have seen too many advertisements and stories about those nefarious "fidget spinners" recently, or whatever the reason for mislearning that word. I mean "figment", of course.

chownah wrote:I think this won't work for imagined things which are not consciously or willfully imagined.

Okay, I guess you're right. I think the underlying problem is how to distinguish between what is real or what is imagined at all? Taking it further, it could even be that one's free will of imagining things is also only imagined.

Opening the gazillionth topic about solipsism here, to not lead this topic further astray.